School

Well, maybe not that new - but definitely something that is getting more and more important.

The embedded development toolbox is rapidly expanding, and it is becoming harder and harder to find people skilled in these tools. Starting from the university, 'embedded' is considered hard and not as 'cool' as traditional software development. Why spend hours hacking away and reading datasheet to get to blink a LED and send 'hello world' over a UART when you could build rich graphical programs with web technologies or mobile? The fact that embedded development requires a wide skill set going from electronics, process control, signal processing to software, to Matlab means that substantial time is required to form a good base on which to build the required specialized skill sets. Not many people are willing to do that.

From a recent LinkedIn thread (didn't correct spelling, but you get the idea):

Need suggestion for future career

Hello all, I'm looking for a new job, but now I'm really confused. My friends suggest me for iOS/Android development, 'cause that are the most popular and easy to get started. But for me, that's not cool, not challenging and not exciting at all. No offents. Most of them are SNS and incredible easy on programing. I was tired some hardware R&D company, didn't goes well, very little salary or named "R&D" in fact "Copy and Paste"(and some company just told me that "BEc not under consideration"). I love embedded C programming, but looks my country didn't (nobody interested in teach newbie), it's too hard to improve my skill without product R&D. Should I follow my firend's advice to became a framework based SDE, or other way out?

It is not just this one person, but plenty of other young people struggle with this, in a variety of different fields. I replied with a 5 step 'program' to the question, and it seems that others appreciated it as well. I'm reproducing it here just in case it disappears from LinkedIn...

Recently I've noticed an increasing amount of questions in several LinkedIn groups I joined regarding people new in the field asking questions which are easily found using a basic internet search. Furthermore, we have students and others ask questions with regard to degrees and experience in the field. After replying to dozens of posts like that, I thought it would be good to condense the information spread across several groups into one blog post as a reference for future questions.

While the groups in question are particularly focused on embedded engineering, operating systems and software engineering, I assume similar posts are present in other groups. Hopefully, some will find their way to this blog and find the information in this post useful. I'm sure this phenomenon isn't limited to LinkedIn groups either...